Cremation, Caste, and Cosmogony in Karmic Traditions.

Prologue and preparations
Before 2002, the brutal realities at Pashupatinath were
immediately striking to anyone entering the holy area.
The mythological greatness and the glorious sacredness
were drowned in pollution and sewage. Bagmati River
was highly contaminated, and as a sadhu said; “only the
name is big”, referring to the river of sewage and
poisonous water which foreign pilgrims and tourists
alike could not believe was the most holy river for the
Nepali people. The sacredness and holiness of both the
river and the temple vanished along with the increasing
level of pollution. The water quality deteriorated in
different ways, which included domestic sewage,
industrial waste, agricultural discharge, dumping of solid
waste, haphazard land use, and the river being diverted
for drinking water. Bagmati River is fundamental in
every ritual performed at Pashupatinath, and when the
river had become a death-giver instead of live-giver, the
water changed the devotees’ attitudes, rituals, festivals,
and religious beliefs.
The river was not holy in actual life, and the discrepancy
between myth and matter was revealing. Reality collided
with religion. The physical environment influenced the
religion and the ritual practices. The ideology of religion
is founded and based on a certain type of environment
and premises, but at Pashupatinath reality did not fit with
religion and religion did not fit with reality. When the
supposedly holy water was a filthy sewage, the
materiality of reality could not be used for the proper
religious purposes and ritual practices. Offering water to
Shiva is an honourable religious practice – benefiting
both the God and the devotees – to soil the god with
poisonous sewage is a desecrating action.
Ritual purity and physical purity of water are interrelated
despite the body of myths emphasising the holiness of
Pashupatinath and Bagmati. The physical state and the
degree of impurity of the river have a feedback effect on
perceptions of holiness and purity. The devotees had to
incorporate the physical realities into their performance
of rituals, and people reacted to the polluted environment
in various ways. Due to the problems of pollution a
sewage cleaning station was opened just before
Shivaratri 2002. The river turned from being sewage into
a clean river within a few days. This was a major
modification of the physical environment where
politicians and engineers re-created the ritual space and
the environment they believed the devotees and the gods
demanded for the rituals. Therefore, the importance of
water in ritual life and society is illuminated in the
cleaning of Bagmati River for religious purposes only,
Chapter 12:
Shivaratri, sadhus, and sewage
187
but it also reveals disputes and discussions of the nature
of sacredness, and the importance of a visually clean
river. Mythology is inseparable from materiality. The
interrelatedness between culture (or religion) and nature
will be elaborated upon with the human intervention in
the physical and sacred environment as a point of
departure, focusing on holy men and pilgrims and their
relation to Bagmati River at Shivaratri from 2001 to
2003, and I will start with the problems before the
sewage cleaning station was opened.
In 2001 Shivaratri was on February 21. Pilgrims from all
over India and Nepal came to Pashupatinath, and they
were as varied as they were numbered. In the
newspapers before the festival it was estimated that
250.000 people were expected to participate. The real
number of devotees is difficult to estimate, and the exact
number is unimportant. What matters is that hundreds of
thousands came to this festival with one purpose: to
perform the prescribed purifying rites; rituals that they
were unable to do due to the polluted state of the river.
The mythological greatness of the creation of cosmos
did not fit with the filthy river and the actual rites
performed. To remedy the defect the preparations for the
festival started many days before the actual happening.
Not only because of the festival, but also as a result of
little water in general, half of the riverbed was drained
and led into a smaller part of the river making the waterflow
bigger in this remaining part. Despite the filthy and
toxic water, it had to be flowing freely where the ashes
were thrown into it after the cremations. A free- flowing
river is one criterion for holiness. The charcoal and halfburnt
wood from the pyres were collected less than fifty
metres further down in the river – sometimes just below
the ghats – partly because it represented an income for
the very poorest, but more importantly, the funeral
debris would otherwise block the river.
Since hardly anybody had taken holy baths in Bagmati
River the last years due to the pollution, Pashupatinath
Area Development Trust (PADT) had erected several
water taps where the devotees could perform rituals and
take cleansing “baths”. The water taps were constructed
the day before Shivaratri and removed the day after. At
the western side PADT had built fences where the
devotees had to stand in line waiting on their way to the
temple. The devotees were not satisfied with a small
shower of tap water on the ghats instead of a holy bath in
the river, and very few did actually use the taps in their
rituals, partly because the majority of the taps were
constructed on the eastern side of the river whereas the
devotees were lined up in a queue on the other side.